The Little Rock Nine, September 1957

Elizabeth Eckford arrived alone. It was September fourth, nineteen fifty-seven, the first day of classes at Little Rock Central High School, and she had not received the message that the other eight students were meeting first at the home of Daisy Bates, the Little Rock NAACP leader who had spent months organizing and coaching the nine teenagers who would attempt to integrate the school. Eckford walked through a crowd of screaming adults and came to a line of Arkansas National Guard soldiers. Governor Orval Faubus had deployed them not to protect her but to block her. A white woman named Grace Lorch, whose name appears in almost none of the popular accounts, guided Eckford away from the mob and onto a public bus.

The nine students were Carlotta Walls LaNier, Ernest Green, Melba Pattillo Beals, Jefferson Thomas, Elizabeth Eckford, Terrence Roberts, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed Wair, and Minnijean Brown Trickey. All nine would return. President Eisenhower, under federal court order to enforce integration, federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered the hundred-and-first Airborne Division to Little Rock on September twenty-fourth. Twelve hundred soldiers arrived. For the first time since Reconstruction, federal troops were deployed in the American South to protect the rights of Black citizens against a state governor.

The nine students spent a full academic year under daily harassment, physical assault, and organized intimidation by white students and adults who had free access to the building. Minnijean Brown was eventually suspended, then expelled, after responding to a tormentor. Ernest Green, the oldest of the nine, became the first Black graduate of Little Rock Central High in May of nineteen fifty-eight. Martin Luther King attended the ceremony.

Governor Faubus closed all four Little Rock high schools for the nineteen fifty-eight to fifty-nine school year rather than allow continued integration. The city called it the Lost Year. White students lost a year of public education. Black students lost a year and had never been given one to begin with.

The building still operates as a high school. The National Historic Site visitor center is beside it, on the same block where the crowd stood.